It is often useful for managers and end-users of data within an organization to understand the lineage of such data by analyzing where the data originate, where and how the data are transformed, and where the data flow within the organization. Tools such as the INFOSPHERE™ METADATA WORKBENCH, commercially-available from International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., support this type of data lineage analysis by modeling and analyzing an organization's data infrastructure, including Business Intelligence (BI) reporting layers, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) layers, data marts, data warehouses, staging databases, intermediate files, file transfer processes, Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes, and operational data stores. (INFOSPHERE is a registered trademark or common law mark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.) The information produced during a data lineage analysis is often detailed and complex, enumerating all of the databases, files, systems, and transformations that lie along the various paths between the data sources and destinations that are within the scope of the analysis. However, data managers and end-users do not always require such comprehensive data lineage information for their purposes, and may even find sifting through comprehensive data lineage information to be an inefficient endeavor.